


Surprises

by MysteryMuse



Series: Random Access Memory [18]
Category: Rockman X | Mega Man X
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Frustration, Kissing, M/M, Manipulation, Snipe Hunt, Surprise Canon Intrusions, Teasing, X Makes Zero Work For Once, X is a Master Troll
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-27
Updated: 2014-12-27
Packaged: 2018-03-03 20:12:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2886065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MysteryMuse/pseuds/MysteryMuse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt from Metalhime on Tumblr: X has a surprise for Zero, but Zero has to work hard to find out what that is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Surprises

When Zero came back from the mission, X met him in the second hanger, all smiles. The blue Reploid rested a hand on the crook of Zero's arm and grinned at him. The other Hunters smirked knowingly at their backs as X led Zero away down the hall.    
  
"I have a surprise for you, but it's not ready yet."  
  
Zero quirked an eyebrow under his helmet. He was intrigued, but also nervous. X's 'surprises' tended to be eccentric. In the past, it'd ranged from a specific piece of clothing X had wanted Zero to wear (the frills; Zero gave a little grimace at the recollection- why was X so obsessed with having him wear ruffled skirts?) to a three-day off-base pass to go visit a rare and stunning natural wonder (that the Mavericks hadn't blown up yet) to a random gift of a handmade clay tea set (which had been seasoned over the course of three uprisings by X, all without Zero ever having a clue it was happening).    
  
Zero eyed X. "Do I get any hints?"  
  
X pressed his fingers into Zero's arm a little tighter - a warning, Zero knew - and gave the smallest shake of his head. The sparkle in X's eyes was turning distinctly mischievous. "You'll find out when I'm ready."  
  
"You know this is gonna drive me nuts until you tell me," Zero said as they moved back into their common.  
  
X just chuckled. "Yeah, I know." Once they were inside, the moment the door closed and seperated them from the hallway, he let go of Zero and gave the blond a light push, cheerful. "Now go shower, you smell like you've been swimming in a garbage compactor."  
  
Zero mumbled, "Heavy metal reclamation facility, not garbage," and wandered off into the shower. While he was cleaning himself off, he continued musing about X's 'surprise'. He wrung out his hair and reviewed his optical footage from the last several days, looking through his systems for any hints as to what X might have planned. Nothing seemed particularly unusual or out of place.  (He did decide to review some evidence from two nights ago more closely but that had nothing to do with suspicious behavior, and a lot more to do with fucking hot behavior.)  
  
Okay, so he couldn't get any ideas or clues just from visual and audio evidence, because nothing out of the ordinary had happened. He thought to ping Axl and ask, but - wait, no, Axl probably wouldn't tell him what X was planning if he knew. That wasn't how their arrangement worked. So he was on his own on this. He frowned into the mirror as he dried his hair. "What the hell are you planning, X?"  
  
It nagged at him as he slid into some comfortable pants and left the shower. It probably wouldn't do him any good to look in the cupboards, right? But he did still fire off a quick round of x-ray scans at the various shelves and storage spots, which turned up nothing. X would probably have thought of that and stashed the whatever-the-surprise-was either on himself, in his armor, or off-base. Hm. Maybe it wasn't a physical object this time?  
  
Zero wandered over to the common kitchen, still grinding the situation in a background process, and opened the fridge to retrieve a Life Bottle. Just like that, he felt X pressing against his back, arms snaking around him. X giggled quietly against Zero's shoulder, and Zero leaned up and back, into X's grip. He tipped his head back, cheek brushing against X's for a moment. His core revved. "This isn't my surprise, is it?" Zero asked, keeping it casual while he broke the seal on the bottle and took a sip.  
  
"Nope," X said, amused, and gently plucked the bottle away from Zero. "Maybe you should look in your closet. There might be a hint there."  
  
Zero let his engine rev loud enough to be heard through his synthskin - a warning sound of his own. He was willing to play along with these games, but that didn't mean he'd do it meekly. "Shit, you're going to make me work for this."  
  
"Half the fun of a surprise is the anticipation, Zero," X rejoined, coy, green eyes gleaming and impish. "Go check."  
  
Zero huffed, grabbed the rest of the bottle and turned crisply to go peek into "his" closet. X was following him; Zero was almost entirely certain X was lying and just trying to lure him into the space to trap him; the closet had been designed with a magnetic door that couldn't be opened from inside. Probably, X intended to lock him inside for a while to drag out the situation. Dammit, he was too good at this.  
  
To Zero's surprise his scan did reveal an object nestled on a shelf at the back end of the little room, and he sucked in his breath before moving toward it. He was not nearly as surprised when - as he expected - he felt air moving against his back, and the low, heavy thump of the closet's door sealing behind him.  
  
Yeah, he was locked in.     
  
And there was still the object to investigate, so Zero found the little closet's light switch by feel, then reached up to the shelf. His fingers brushed what felt like wrapping paper, a thin strand of rope; a gift bag? He pulled it off the shelf.  
  
The bag was gold and red, with crinkled red wrapping paper and something heavy tucked inside. Zero moved and sat on one of the cushions on the floor and rustled around inside the bag. But after pulling apart the layers of tissue paper, he just found a strange metal object - silver, completely smooth and featureless, a cube about 4 by 4 inches.  
  
It was impervious to surface scans, X-ray and every other form of vision Zero possessed; he wasn't even sure if it was a hollow or solid object from the weight.  
  
"Hmph. Something to keep me busy, I suppose," Zero said to the locked door, and proceeded to turn around the object in his hands. He tried digging at it, shaking it to see if it rattled, sending code into it, and even banging it on the wall. It resisted every attempt, and remained mysterious. After a little while of struggling with it, Zero gave up. He sent X a message through radio. [What the hell is this thing?]  
  
[Not your surprise,] X answered, and then promptly temp-banned Zero from communicating with him for 6 hours.  
  
Zero growled and curled up on the pillows, poking at the silver cube now and then, and settled in to wait out his evening. He was, at that point, starting to feel incredibly turned on by X's little game, but he decided to try and ride it out rather than relieve his arousal. The floor recharger tiles came on after about two hours, filling the little room with a subtle, soothing heat. Zero let himself relax into it and drifted off to sleep running his fingertips along one of the cube's edges.  
  
\- - -  
  
A change in air - a brief coolness - moved across his face and woke Zero. As his optics refocused, he noticed the door was propped open and the cube had disappeared, along with its wrappings. Instead, X was sitting on the floor next to him, smiling.  
  
"Sorry about that. I needed time to finish making all the arrangements for your surprise and it was easier to do with you safely out of the way. That's all done now, so you can come out again."  
  
"Mm," Zero rubbed a stiff spot out of his neck and sat up. His curiousity piqued again, he let X help pull him onto his feet. X took his hand, and Zero followed the other Reploid back into the hall. Nothing looked any different, though. What were the arrangements X needed to make? "X, I'm dying here," Zero finally said, "Give me something."  
  
X snickered. "Wellll, it's not going to be something you get right now, Zero. I have a mission staging in an hour; I just wanted to make sure you were set loose before I leave. I could have probably left you, since I'm using Axl as my tag assist for this one, but... that seemed a little cruel." X's fingers tightened around Zero's hand, a quick affectionate squeeze. "Especially since your only misbehavior was to try and find out about the surprise ahead of time."  
  
Zero groaned at X. "Ugh, so you let me out just to tell me I don't get to find out for hours more still?"  
  
The blue Reploid turned and made an exaggerated 'hmmm', tapping his own lips. "Wellll, I suppose you might find a clue or something interesting in the Sky Room?"  
  
Zero narrowed an eye at his partner. "I suppose you think that hint is enough to get me to go there right away. You're leading me around, aren't you...?"  
  
X didn't answer - he just grinned wider.  
  
"Ugh!" Zero threw up his hands. "This is payback for that snipe hunt gag I pulled on you during your rookie days, I can tell." He leaned forward, pushing his face close to X's all at once, lowered his voice to a sinuous rumble and sent a sharp, heavy throb of energy out of his core to press his will against X's. "You can only jerk me around like this so long, X." He promptly blurred into a rising needle of red light and vanished, teleporting out to the Sky Room.  
  
X laughed at him over radio. [You can handle a little frustration for once, Zero. Besides... It's fun to watch you squirm. Maybe your surprise is in there somewhere...]  
  
When Zero materialized at the Sky Room, he found the entrance hall stacked floor to ceiling with carefully wrapped boxes, all in bright red and gold paper. There was a dull throbbing filling the air that he recognized as a low-level signal jammer; he couldn't figure out where it was located as it was scrambling his ability to pinpoint its waveform, so he couldn't defeat it. He couldn't scan the boxes for their contents, and he couldn't lock back onto the teleporter to leave as long as the jammer was running. So he was stuck there.  
  
"Oh, man," Zero groaned - he realized he was going to have to tear open every. single. box. Probably X had hidden either the surprise or the control to the jammer inside one of the boxes. X knew him too well. At least he had something to break for a while.

Zero gritted his teeth, and reached for the first box.  
  
\- - -  
  
Zero sat on the floor surrounded by flurries of torn wrapping paper and mangled boxes. Most of them contained only notes, in X's handwriting, saying "Nope!" or "Not here!" or "Sorry, keep trying!" He had started using his teeth just for the satisfaction of destroying the paper.  
  
But finally one of the boxes felt heavier as he grabbed it, so he attacked it with fresh vigor, shredding apart the paper and tape with his raw, sore-feeling fingertips. He had a moment of dread as he caught a glint of metal. One eye squinted closed - was it was another of those stupid cube things?  
  
It was. Zero groaned even louder and flopped backward on the floor, shoving his hand through his hair. "AAaaargh."  
  
He lay staring at the ceiling, huffing with frustration. "That can't be it. It can't be. There's gotta be something else here!"  
  
His fingertips were throbbing and his hands ached, but his frustration gave him another burst of energy. He grabbed down another box, ripped into it, and was quite surprised when it turned out to contain his Z-saber.  
  
He blinked twice as he picked up the weapon and stared at it. "What are you doing here?" X surely couldn't have... did he know him that well that he knew the moment he'd... that wasn't possible, was it?  
  
 _Well, maybe. Heh_. Zero closed his eyes. "Probably shouldn't have given me this, X..."  
  
He thumbed on the blade, and exploded into a flurry of spinning slashes and long dives, aiming straight for the remaining boxes still stacked up by the entrance. The boxes flew into bits, and a few more silver cubes were revealed- as well as, to Zero's satisfaction, the control for the jammer. Zero grinned savagely when he found it and tossed it lightly into the air, hacking it into several molten chunks with swift, easy strokes of the blade.  
  
Finally the background throbbing making his head ache ceased. He gave a long, contented sigh - getting to hack things apart with the Saber was incredibly calming. He prodded at one of the cubes with the Saber's tip, but nothing seemed to happen. The material diffused the Saber's energy, but seemed otherwise unharmed. "Huh. What kind of material is this?" Zero felt the back of his neck prickling. Something wasn't right.  
  
He frowned and walked past the ruin he'd made in the main entrance hall to investigate further. The Sky Room's connecting corridors were all lined with gift boxes. He slashed open some, and more cubes spilled out to the floor, thumping dully, gleaming inert.  
  
"What have you set up here, X?" Zero murmured.  
  
He followed the line of boxes until they finally started to taper off at the entrance to his training space. When they'd made their add-ons to the Sky Room, they'd each added personal rooms as well as a common area, a miniature _onsen_ , and a practice space with springy wood floors, holo-generators, and high ceilings. It was the last room, the most recently added, and where the gift box trail led him.  
  
As Zero walked into the room, he suddenly had a gut feeling: _I should have collected my armor before I came._ That gut feeling was confirmed when X, in one of his heavier armors, teleported into the room on Zero's left side. "Hi!" X chirped. "Oh, you might want to duck, Zero."  
  
"Wha-" And Zero ducked, because X told him to, and just barely missed having a flying silver cube crash into the back of his head. He gasped and rolled to the right, escaping damage and watching in surprise as he leveled out and saw the silver cubes flying through the door in neat rows. They started clumping together at the back of the room.  
  
"X, what...?"  
  
The cubes were clumping together tighter. Zero stared at them as they fused into a single blob and then started to melt, somehow, into a silver puddle on the floor. "Is THIS my surprise?"  
  
X shook his head, giving Zero a curious look. "Still not it! Have fun!" he yelled, and then dashed away to the leftmost corner of the room. The silver puddle reformed into a large round blobby shape with thick, stumpy legs and heavy-set arms and hands. It promptly tried to grab Zero, shooting out a fist on a huge silver arm. A bright red orb-eye opened briefly in the silver body, blinked at Zero.  
  
"Gah!" The blond spun clear, narrowly avoiding being crushed. His core accelerated to full combat speed. His thoughts melted away, his entire focus turning onto the weird silver beast right in front of him. His Saber wasn't having any effect! When he landed a blow, the thing broke apart into a swirl of cubes again, whirling around like a tornado then reforming; Zero was kept too busy frantically dodging being struck by them to be able to see where the red eye had gone.  
  
This advantage didn't last too long though; Zero's body was learning the enemy's pattern as he dodged, and there was something... strange, almost familiar, in an eerie way. Something Zero didn't consciously understand, but which he felt with increasing sureness. Very soon his panic, confusion and alarm melted into a great, cool clarity; he knew what to do and how to beat the thing - he just had to ride out the sequence until it reformed. _Hit the eye_ , that eerie sense inside told him, _with thunder_ , and he obeyed his inner sense.  
  
The silver monster melted, swirled, and reformed several times. Zero dodged - took a few hits, not too bad, he could still fight through it - and waited until he saw the red eye open wide. Then he charged hard at it, giving a focusing cry and lunging into a smooth Raikousen. He stabbed the Saber hilt-deep into the red eye. It snapped in two around the blade, and the silver structure flopped apart into a lifeless pool of shiny silver gunk on the floor.  
  
Zero stood, gathering his breath, then went to retrieve the Saber. The blade was embedded inside a chunk of black metal - the mechanism behind the eye, apparently. He put his foot on the ruined mechanism and tugged the Saber out, then turned to find out if X was still in the room.  
  
He was, and he was grinning as big as could be. "You haven't lost your power, Zero."  
  
"X, what the hell?" Zero moved toward X, Saber loose in his fighting hand. "Did you seriously just set me up for a fight for no reason?"  
  
"Not for no reason," X waggled a finger. "I wanted to see you fight again. It's been a while, and you look really hot when you fight, Zero. I was controlling it, I wouldn't have let it hurt you too much. Besides, how long has it been since you had a good, clean fight like that?"  
  
Zero gaped a bit but shut his mouth and then chuckled. "It's been a while," he admitted, with a shrug. Which promptly sent a shock of soreness down his bruised shoulder. "Ugh."  
  
X was instantly at his side, looking over his damage and putting a hand on his back. "Easy."  
  
"Forget it, I'm just sore," Zero said, giving a little push on X's shoulder and straightening again. "What the heck was that thing anyway? I felt like I knew it somehow, while I was fighting it."  
  
The other Hunter nodded. "I found the eye of this thing in a ruin about two months ago. It seemed like it'd make an interesting toy for us to play with, so I figured out how it ran and spent a while putting it back together. It's something called a "Devil"; I made this one out of electrolyzed titanium and mercury alloy. I had to really dink around with it to make it saber-proof, and it's also proof against any of my weapons except a Nova Strike. The eye's the only weak spot."  
  
"Mm. Pretty cool, but I just trashed all your hard work," Zero noted.  
  
X handwaved, airily. "Nah, the eye is the easiest part of the mechanism to fix. All I have to do is build a replacement eye and it'll be up and running again. Now that I know the code works, and it holds up in battle, I can modify it to do all kinds of other fun things for us." X shot Zero a Meaningful Glance. "It's very flexible material."  
  
Zero _oh_ 'd. "Ah-ha. Now that sounds reasonable..." He started to grin too, and nudged at a bit of the silver goop on the floor with his toes. It felt smooth, cold, and seemed to pull the heat out of his skin. "But you said this ISN'T my surprise?"  
  
X shook his head. "Nope. This is." He pounced Zero to the floor, throwing them both into the middle of the silver mess, and gave him a big, cheerful kiss, sliding his hands into Zero's to hold them on the floor.  
  
X pushed close, breathing over Zero's lips. "I don't need the eye intact to control the Devil's material."  
  
Zero felt the floor start to ripple underneath his back...  



End file.
